Community Notebook

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Roadside Activism

Billboard by Annie Leibovitz

The man’s thick arms wrap completely around the trunk of a tree. His chest, stomach, and pelvis are pressed to the tree, and a massive back bulges and curves toward the trunk. He wears the tight, strapped suit of a wrestler. His one visible leg bends and plants itself on the ground, as if he were preparing to uproot the tree and crush its life out. His eyes, though, are blissfully shut. He is hugging the tree. Below him is written, “Save the Hudson Valley. Stop St. Lawrence Cement.”

Mounted on a billboard, this image is visible to motorists traveling west on Route 23, toward the city of Hudson, in Columbia County. After the intersection with 9H, the billboard can be seen on the left after passing Sunset Meadows. The image was created by world-famous celebrity photographer Annie Liebovitz.

The billboard is the latest work of public art sponsored by the Hudson Valley Billboard Project, an organization whose mission is to bring attention to the issues surrounding the cement plant currently being considered for construction in the Columbia County town of Greenport. Proposed by the St. Lawrence Cement Company, the plant would emit, by the company’s figures, an estimated 17,500,000 pounds of pollutants into the environment annually. While some groups are fighting the plant through government regulation processes, legal action, and community organizing, the Billboard Project has chosen art as their weapon, and billboards as their medium. The Project says that it plans to continue its work “as long as there are resources to fund the message that massive out-of-scale projects such as St. Lawrence Cement ... are totally inappropriate to the well-being of this beautiful region.”

The Project’s organizing principle is a commitment to art as an essential and highly effective force in political activism. Their concept is one that has been proven over several millennia of history. Ever since humans have organized themselves into civilizations, artists have questioned the morality of their collective actions. An Egyptian temple painting over 3,000 years old depicts a pharaoh and his troops crushing Nubians underfoot; the victims’ expressions of terror are enough to indicate that the artist had mixed feelings about the pharaoh’s war tactics. In ancient Argos, a bronze votive plaque showed a warrior on his battle steed, but its inscription, “A Curse Upon Enyalios (Mars),” was clearly anti-militaristic.

In the thousands of years since these initial drawings, “protest art” has emerged as a genre by becoming increasingly direct in its quest for truth, and more brazen and avant-garde. Jacques-Louis David’s Death of Marat (1793) laid a foundation for modern “protest art” by painting his subject neither ideally nor allegorically. Marat, a leader of the French revolution, was stabbed to death while taking a bath. David renders him just as he must have been: lifeless in a vacant room, soaking in a tub of bloody water.

Several decades later, Francisco Goya painted the brutality inflicted by Napoleon’s troops in Spain. The Third of May, 1808, captures a killing squad just before the moment of execution, creating a confrontation with government mandated murder that is as tense and direct as possible. Picasso’s Guernica (1937), probably the most famous protest piece of all time, took the genre of protest art another step towards using shock value as its most effective communicator. Fragmented, abstract, strewn with beasts and ghostly forms, Guernica perhaps makes the bombing of the Basque village more horrifying than if it were rendered realistically.

In the media battle for the minds of citizens, the tactic of the Hudson Valley Billboard Project is to grab people’s attention by making images that are more interesting than the thousands of other images being flashed at them each day. This, of course, is also the strategy of every other business and special interest group that uses media to gain support, not excluding the Billboard Project’s sworn enemy, St. Lawrence Cement. The cement company’s Web site (www.stlawrencecement.com) features images of a father and son interacting outdoors, of pristine waters and verdant forests. SLC would have the viewer associate these cheerful images with their company, just as their recent Hudson Valley advertisements create pictures of increased prosperity that are to be correlated with their proposed plant.

Money is power in media warfare. Financially, the Hudson Valley Billboard Project cannot compete with the likes of SLC (owned by the multi-national Holnam corporation), but it does have something very potent on its side. By the sheer virtue of its cause, it has attracted a number of hugely talented and highly respected artists to lend their work to the billboards. Unlike simple propaganda, great art captures the eye as well as the imagination. It arouses emotion, and most importantly, it provokes thought. The question that remains, though, is how a culture accustomed to sensational and ego-boosting advertisements responds to images designed to make them think. Desensitized as they are by the daily barrage of images, do people recognize great art when they see it?

Over the past two decades, activist art in mass media has at least proven itself hard to ignore. Some projects have provoked titters, double takes, or the condemnation of a church group or alderman. Others have been so well-received that they have become integrated into pop culture. Emblems that are now familiar, such as “Silence=Death” over an upside down triangle, and the red ribbon, were created by activist artists demanding awareness about AIDS. Collectives of AIDS artists have in fact spearheaded the most recent activist art movement. Abandoning an elitist, abstract modernist ethic, groups such as Gran Fury and the Silence=Death Project have made their work and their messages as accessible as possible. Their slogans and symbols are designed not to be in one place (like in a museum) but to be everywhere. They are simple and easily recognizable, and have become mainstream icons.

Of all forms of mass media, billboards are arguably the most accessible. They stand constantly in public spaces, and there is no viewing fee—not even the price of a magazine, or the cost of owning a TV. Billboard project organizer Linda Mussmann says of their decision to use billboards: “It is a car culture up here. People are always running to the store and from one place to another. [Billboards] are the media that provide the best means to reach people.” Judging from the recent proliferation of billboards used as activist tools, quite a few other artists must agree with Mussman. In 1991, photo-billboards sprung up around New York City depicting the rumpled, empty bed of artist Felix Gonzales-Torres. The billboards were a reminder of AIDS, and a commemoration to his infected lover, who had just passed away. A project in San Diego responded to simultaneous immigrant bashing and dependence on immigrant labor for a tourist economy. Billboards across the city proclaimed, “Welcome to America’s finest tourist plantation.” Artist Melanie Manchot put photos of her scantily clad 67-year-old grandmother on billboards to challenge media objectification of the female body. A recent billboard campaign in San Francisco questioned traditional conceptions of gender roles.

The billboard by Annie Liebovitz for the Hudson Valley Billboard Project will remain up through the month of March. The next billboard will be designed by photographer William Wegman, whose Weimaraner dogs are his best known subjects. Previous billboards have featured work by local artists Lynn Davis (November 2000) and Claudia Bruce (December ’00-January ’01). Davis’s billboard made some poor soul so angry that he/she resorted to defacing it. (Davis’s billboard featured a photograph of Holnam’s cement factory in Devil’s Slide, Utah with caption: “It’s Big, Ugly, Noisy and Toxic. STOP St. Lawrence Cement.) The vandalism succeeded in bringing more publicity to the Project, and was a reminder that great art stirs up strong emotions. Hopefully, the art will also make people think.

For more information on the HVBP, or to send financial or artistic contributions, contact Linda Mussmann at (518) 822-8448.
—Joshua Cohen